Is “café” a French word?

I wrote a tweet earlier in the week: “Parisians are usually self-centred, but there’s an exception. They absolutely love to share their cold germs.” I wrote this because after getting sneezed and coughed at in the Métro all winter, I finally contracted a sore throat and have been mopng around for the past few days croaking that we Europeans ought to adopt the polite Japanese system of wearing a mask whenever we get a cold, so as to keep it to ourselves. I also spent quite a bit of time swearing at the cold germs, in both French and English, which was unfair because it’s not their fault. They are simply organisms trying to survive, and my throat happens to be an attractive piece of real estate. It’s all part of living on this planet of ours.

I say this not to evoke sympathy but because it is all a very neat analogy.

During the week, as I was swearing unjustly at my cold germs, a friend sent me an email with a link to one of the silliest and yet most serious websites I have seen in a very long time. Actually, I first saw it about two years ago, when I started writing my novel The Merde Factor, which features the creators of a similar website, in a fictionalized form. But I hadn’t looked at it since, and found a few wonderful updates.

It’s a website called Francophonie Avenir, which could be translated (if I’m allowed to translate it) into something like “the future of French speaking”. It is home to a campaign against foreign (especially English) language “pollution” of French. Every time a French company uses English in an advert, for example, there’s a protest message and a petition is launched. For example, the SNCF, France’s railway company, started a new, cheap ticket service called “Ouigo”, which is of course a pun on “we go” with the French “oui” inserted, thereby also making it a positive-sounding “yes go”. It’s a cute linguistic joke, and surely by using it, the SNCF is saying that they think their audience is intelligent enough to understand bilingual puns – and understanding as many things about life as possible is progress, right? Not according to the Francophonie people, who regard the name as pollution. It should be, if I may use a non-French term, verboten.

The reason why my friend sent me the link was that these people had issued a letter complaining because parliament has just voted a law whereby all French schoolkids will learn English from the age of 11. The Francophonie people called this obligation to learn something non-French “viol”, or rape, which, as I pointed out in another tweet, proves they don’t understand French. Rape is a violent hate crime. Education is not. Helping schoolkids to understand the world a little better, to communicate in different ways with different people, even helping them to understand bilingual puns – these are all good things, surely. No, they’re rape. Well I’m sorry, but people who call education rape are the same ones who burn books and invade Poland.

(By the way, If you don’t believe me about the “viol”, see the section headed “Les Députés votent l’anglais obligatoire dès le CP”.)

The world as seen by these people would be a blinkered and slow-moving one. Pizza would be known in France as “flat round bread covered with a (usually) tomato-based sauce and baked”. Cafés couldn’t be called cafés, because the word originally came from Italian. They couldn’t be bistros, either – that’s Russian. Where would the French drink? And what would they drink? Bière is of Saxon origin. Vin is ancient Greek, or even older than that. Oh là là! (I hope it’s OK to say that).

I think I’ve made my point with the same sledgehammer subtlety as they use. What I’m saying is that language is like a cold virus – it jumps naturally from one person to the other, it gets mutated and passed on, it’s alive, and has been travelling the world ever since one of our ancestors grunted at someone who wasn’t in his clan. what’s more, if you look at the etymology of modern French, almost all of it is a corruption of Latin, the language of the Roman invaders in this part of the world. And if we’re going to take things to the limit, why stop at what we call foreign languages? Surely mathematics should be banned, too. Isn’t that a language based on Arabic symbols?

Sorry, now I’ve convinced myself. I’m going to have to go and destroy my computer. The keyboard is covered in zeros, minuses and other foreign symbols. There are even £ and $ signs. Oh là làet au revoir.

Warning: Stephen Clarke’s latest novel The Merde Factorcontains scenes in which people try to organize a poetry competition in Paris and allow poets to read their works in both French and English. Fortunately, there are patriots on hand to disrupt the contest. And in fact it is a blessing, because most of the English poems are truly awful – especially the ones by the hero’s crazed friend, Jake.